This entry covers “Gen13” volume two issues 6 and 7 by Brandon Choi, J. Scott Campbell, Jim Lee and Scott Williams.
The Gen13 kids are on their way to America, but due to an airport strike, they get stuck in Rome, Italy. Apparently, James McArthur hooked the kids up with a friend of his and Lynch’s to take care of the kids while they wait for a flight home. Mr. Bovini gets the kids outfitted in fancy high fashions, and new haircuts for the ladies, before taking them out to a swanky dinner.
At din din, Grunge acts like a cad and upsets Roxy, but Bobby cheers her up. Speaking of “cheers” the kids share a bit too many drinks. Which results in Grunge throwing up and Rainmaker and Bobby making out until they pass out. The next morning Rainmaker brushes Bobby off, which sends him into a tizzy, leading him to overreact flying straight up into the air, blazing flames. Unfortunately, this attracts the attention of the local authorities, as it is a violation of something or other, and Italy thinks it may be under superpowered attack or whatever.
Our old pals the Order of the Cross seem to have their superhero team known as the Centurions. They’re not fooling around as they manage to capture Roxy, Grunge, and Caitlin. They also knock a whole building down on Rainmaker, which can’t be good. While most of the Centurions team are concentrating on the aforementioned capture of the kids, one member, Domina, is after Bobby. She just about takes him out before he’s saved by an unlikely ally. It’s Ms. Bliss! By “Ms. Bliss” I mean Nicole Callahan and not Hayley Mills.
So where has Bliss been? Well, her, her brother Threshold and their boss Ivana Baiul have been holed up on Caballito Island hiding from I/O. Not only are they hiding out, they’re defrosting and training the Gen-Active kids that Ivana put on ice as Project Genesis was falling apart. Bliss got sick of all that and decided to bounce and tour the world while Ivana and Threshold trained the DV8 kids. Not sure if she was specifically searching the Gen13 kids out with her little “Gen-Active finder device” or she was just looking for other Gen-Actives for the fun of it. Either way, she ended up in Italy just in time to save Bobby’s bacon.
Bobby and Bliss team up to save the rest of the Gen13 kids. As luck would have it Rainmaker ended up falling down a manhole into the sewer as that building was falling down around her. With her safe, she joins the rescue squad to go and find Grunge, Roxy, and Caitlin. The trio ends up breaking into the Order of the Cross by way of the men’s room. Meanwhile, Roxy and Grunge manage to break free due to getting into an actual fight, even though Caitlin thinks it’s a diversion at first. Speaking of fights, Bliss and Rainmaker can’t stop their own bickering for a second, even when taking down a hefty group of the Order’s men. That’s commitment to an argument!
Both teams meet up and are trying to find a way out of this mess. Caitlin is accessing all of their files and is trying to get to more of their top secret ones, but keeps getting blocked. As luck would have it, Bliss knows that Ivana has backdoors in just about every computer network ever created! Bliss gets Caitlin where she needs to be and gets a compliment from Caitlin at the same time. Caitlin then threatens to upload all of the Order of the Cross’s secret information to the public. Since the Order has secrets they’d rather keep to themselves, they let the kids go.
The Gen13 kids, plus Bliss get a private jet from the Vatican to get them back to Cali. While the team is celebrating another win, Bobby and Bliss share a few tender moments near the back of the plane. However; Bliss being Bliss just can’t be pinned down, and opens the jet door and leaps out of it with a parachute, as if to prove to Bobby, you can never predict some girls.
Continuity Corner:
- We’re finally following up on where Ivana, Threshold, and Bliss have been up to since the end of “Gen13” volume one issue 5.
- We initially see an unnamed DV8 member in the VR training. We don’t see her in the training session itself, but afterward, stuck in her VR suit. This would later be retconned to have been Freestyle, and it was explained that she so underwhelmed Ivana she got put back on ice.
- One of the files that Caitlin threatened to release from the Order of the Cross was Project Lazurus. I literally cannot remember if that ever comes up again. To tell the truth, I sure wish it would’ve along with more appearances by the Centurions.
- I really liked the direction that this book was taking Bliss in, but it wasn’t much longer before she went back to being the super crazy chick she used to be. Of course, there may be a narrative reason for return to nutso-land. You know, with her getting kind of possessed by a Kindred lizard-person. See “DV8” issue 26 for more details.
NEXT: “Deathblow” volume one issues 20 and 21 by Brandon Choi, Trevor Scott and Tom Joyner
weathering wildstorm 
Ah, the polemic “Rainmaker and Bobby sleep together” scene. I think it was heavily implied they had sex, but one way or another it led to endless arguing about Sarah’s sexuality.
Jim Lee might have been one of the building blocks of Wildstorm, but when he designs something as convoluted as the Centurions I’m glad they never showed up again, haha.
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I guess it’s drawn as innocently or salacious as you want to see it. I guess my growing up pretty religious makes me tend to see things pretty tame! Ha! Thus, I just assume it was a heavy make out sesh.
For about half a minute I was going to touch on the nature of Rainmaker’s sexuality, and the arguments that sprung from it, but it all really seems like a product of its time. Some 20 years later I think the world is more clear on sexual-fluidity and there’s not much to really think about when it comes to her. She mostly digs gals, but there’s something special about Bobby and she doesn’t count that out or ignore her feelings. Due to them both being teenagers and trying to define themselves, but coming up against reality, is going to result in constant and messy drama.
About half the Centurions look good, the other half, eh, not so much. On the good end is Domina, she basically looks like a Coda if Bliss got to dress one, and it works. The big dude in the red armor kinda works too. I’m shit with these names because issue 6 had all their speaking in actual Italian and I couldn’t parse it and kinda gave up. In issue 7 they translated it in the usual comic’s style, but I’d already stopped caring about them I guess. Not all ideas are good ones, but WildStorm was always tossing them out seeing what would stick. I think something good could’ve been made of the Centurions, but that would require another writer to care about them, and well, I don’t think the readers cared enough to even pique another writer’s interest to bring them back.
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Oh! It would certainly be interesting if they’d have been picked up in the same fashion as early Wildstorm concepts became sophisticated in the latter days.
Anyhow, I actually meant Rainmaker’s sexuality was interesting from a continuity point of view, even. Lobdell seemed to be the first one to acknowledge she could be bi – but that run was notorious for trying to push the characters beyond their status quo, and that wasn’t what editorial wanted. That’s why his run ended abruptly, and Warren was stuck with the tough job of making a run where characters were stuck into place and couldn’t evolve (even acknowledging it through the characters in the Authority arc).
I think the editorial wanted to have Rainmaker as an LGBT character without any doubts about it – God knows bi characters get ignored in superhero comics (as with recent Iceman and Hercules scandals). Further proof of this is the Simone reboot of Gen13 went back to Sarah being 100% bi.
Anyway, just my interpretation.
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Error, I meant Simone made Sarah 100% gay. That might give my point a little more sense.
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These issues are reprinted in the trade paperbacks “Gen 13: European Vacation”, “Gen 13: Starting Over”, and the black-and-white “Gen 13 Archives”.
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